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There’s no making sense of “The Drama” without discussing its supposedly big twist, which was just about unavoidable online even before the movie opened. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) meet cute in a coffee shop in Boston. Zip ahead two years: they’re engaged and about to marry when, in the course of a wine-soaked evening with two friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), everyone discloses the worst thing they’ve ever done. Only Emma’s confession makes an impression: fifteen years ago, at the age of fifteen, she planned a mass shooting at her high school and nearly went through with it—but instead abandoned the plan and quickly became an anti-gun-violence activist. Rachel, whose cousin is in a wheelchair because of a school shooter, is outraged. Charlie is both horrified that his intended life partner could harbor such monstrous inclinations and terrified that she might get violent with him. He appears reluctant to marry Emma but doesn’t dare back out. Instead, he goes through the motions of preparing for the wedding as his panicky behavior becomes increasingly reckless. Of course, the wedding turns into a powder keg of secrets, and the orderly proceedings blow up in the protagonists’ faces and leave a trail of emotional and physical pain.

Two factors have launched “The Drama” to a level of commercial success and critical praise far surpassing the artistry that its writer and director, Kristoffer Borgli, brings to it. The first is the star power of its lead actors, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, whose presence exemplifies stardom: they’re more interesting to watch than anything the script gives them to say or do. The second is the extensive armchair sociology that the film has inspired. On its cinematic merits alone, the film would never have generated the profusion of think pieces, explainers, debates, and interviews that have both probed and promoted it in recent weeks. It has succeeded in projecting itself outside the screen and into culture at large not by conjuring a persuasive romantic relationship or amply imagined characters but by posing a series of hypothetical moral challenges akin to trolley problems, all of a similar (and woefully unexamined) abstraction. As a result, “The Drama” plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse. This achievement, dubious though it may be, depends upon a cleverly crafted story that builds drama with an astonishing, risible lack of inwardness, by fabricating an illusion of subjectivity. Through flashbacks and leaps ahead in time, fragmentation and fantasy scenes, the film simulates complexity while endowing its characters with mere crumbs of knowledge and experience. Viewers follow this meagre trail methodically, greedily, with heads down, driven by compulsive curiosity. The script is less of a narrative than an addictive algorithm.

Where the recent “Wuthering Heights” attracted attention for its apparent resuscitation of the romance genre, “The Drama” shows why romance hardly exists in current movies except as sidebars and subplots. Love has always been complicated—that’s why John Cassavetes’s movies are enduring landmarks of unpopular art, and why the Hays Code collapsed—but relationships were once, by consensus, straightforwardly observable on film. Today, relationships are no more intrinsically complicated than they ever were, but their verbal and visual basis in texting and social media makes them trickier to depict onscreen. To represent them substantially in the movies requires an original and creative approach to form—starting with script construction and continuing through the way that these varieties of in-person and virtual communications are filmed and displayed onscreen. Thus love, a common experience, enters the category of the extraordinary, demanding higher levels of artistry from filmmakers. With “The Drama,” Borgli does the opposite of rising to the occasion, engineering the movie to avoid dealing with his characters’ teeming and tangled inner lives. He reduces enormous swaths of experience, both personal and public, past and present, face to face and digitally mediated, to inhuman abstractions.

Emma was twenty-eight when she and Charlie met. In the two years between then and the run-up to their wedding, did Charlie never do an online search to find out who he was getting involved with? And, even if not, did this couple never talk about who they were in high school, what people from back then would remember them for? Did Charlie never meet Emma’s family or visit her home town? Have their two years together been a hermetically sealed black box of present-tense activity? Even in the present tense, the characters express no political opinions, taste in movies and music, hobbies—or backstories that shape such inclinations. “The Drama” depicts a couple who have supposedly been together for two years, yet they seem to know each other about as well as a pair of strangers thrown together a few days ago.

This calculated void is built into the movie’s elaborate editing, a striking ruse that’s built to yield puzzle-like solutions. After the coffee-shop meet-cute, the movie cuts two years ahead, to Charlie’s fancy duplex apartment, where he and Mike are working on Charlie’s wedding speech, referring to the early days of his romance with Emma and showing them in flashback. In other words, the entirety of the two-year relationship is boiled down to the few sweet and catchy reminiscences that Charlie offers (along with a joke about his inappropriate wish to talk about their sex life, which he avoids doing, though not before a quick montage of the couple in a variety of positions emphasizes his satisfaction). The apocalyptic gathering at which the two couples confess their worst deeds is fuelled by another cheap dichotomy: en route, Emma and Charlie think that they spot their wedding d.j., Pauline (Sydney Lemmon), smoking heroin on a street corner. Charlie is sure, Emma is less so—and Charlie unhesitatingly wants to fire Pauline, whereas Emma is both less judgmental and less fretful, arguing that what they saw or didn’t see has little bearing on the d.j.’s fitness to work at their wedding. Mike and Rachel take Charlie’s side; when Emma poses a glass-houses challenge (haven’t you ever done anything bad?), the parlor game of confessions is unleashed.

While watching “The Drama,” I found myself pushing hard against the narrow bounds of its characters and imagining a movie that faces complex relationships and experiences unflinchingly. The very setup suggests a screenwriter whose sense of psychology is defined with arid literalism by his own just-so, cut-to-fit contrivances. There are hints tossed out to suggest his characters’ inner recesses. For instance, Rachel, the maid of honor, isn’t a longtime friend of Emma’s; she got to know Emma only in the past two years, through Charlie—and, in her snarky speech at the wedding, Rachel wonders, vengefully, whether Emma has any “real friends.” Moreover, Emma tells Rachel and a colleague named Alice (Hannah Gross) that Charlie is her first love, and explains her late blooming in romance by noting that she used to be “ugly.” Just enough of Emma’s high-school experiences are seen in flashback to suggest other troubles—such as her experience as a Black student in a predominantly white school in Louisiana. She speaks of being socially outcast, and we see snippets of her enduring physical aggression and insults from other kids—conspicuously, not from Black kids, but the subject of her racial identity never comes up explicitly. The flashbacks to Emma’s adolescence, which Borgli films with some curiosity, are far more engaging than the film’s depictions of the chatty Boston bourgeoisie, which exude self-satisfied certainty. His failure to delve deeper into these flashback scenes and situations is as striking as their undeveloped implications.

Charlie’s subjectivity is played as a sick joke: once he learns of Emma’s grim unrealized plan, he can’t stop imagining Emma—both the thirty-year-old woman he’s about to marry and the fifteen-year-old girl (played by Jordyn Curet), whom he’s seen in an old photo—bearing a rifle. He pictures himself romancing both Emmas, at both ages, while they’re armed. Pattinson manages to convey Charlie’s unease without relying on any such crude touches, but the movie abounds in them. In his job, as a museum curator, Charlie receives a book of art photos of women with guns. The wedding photographer (Zoë Winters) insistently talks of “shooting” the couple and their families, which—quickly following flashbacks to the armed teen Emma—plays like a crude double entendre. While the couple is at a florist’s, Charlie hears a gaggle of people running in the street and assumes that they’re fleeing danger. At the wedding itself, a d.j.’s cable bursts with a gunshot-like sound. Such moments hint at comedy, but Borgli plays them humorlessly, as authentic stresses and additional wedges driving the couple apart. The people around them are no help: Rachel and Mike react with shock at Emma’s revelation, and when Charlie consults his colleague Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), she tosses off the word “psychopath” and says that she would call the police.

To the extent that there’s comedy here, it’s as irony: the world at large begins to reflect Charlie’s quandary back to him in incidental details that would otherwise go unnoticed. Those reflections of his private concerns are what “The Drama” offers in lieu of any actual public realm, any politics, any discussion of ideas or ideals. The protagonists are ultimately constructed like robots, accreting no more experiences or traits or memories than they’re programmed to have. The charismatic presence of both the leading and supporting actors doesn’t so much fill out the personalities as substitute for them. For all of its intricacy, the film’s editing conceals a void of disrespect for its characters, for experience, history, emotion, and the cinematic image itself. In its febrile moralism and its facile op-ed-ification, it pontificates about how we live now, but it has no life at all. ♦

An A.I. video recently released by supporters of the Iranian government begins with a robed Shiite Muslim warrior approaching the White House on a stormy night, clutching an ornate split-bladed sword. In the next scene, the weapon slides across President Donald Trump’s cheek. Generated images depict present-day Iranian soldiers defending oil facilities under attack and capturing a U.S. aircraft carrier. Another group pays respects to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading religious figure for millions of Shiites around the world, before launching what appears to be a suicide mission against enemies in Humvees. Then other soldiers attack oil tankers from speedboats as ballistic missiles launch out of a gold-domed mosque, and explosives-laden drones target Dubai. “You can’t kill people who are ready to die for their cause,” the narrator says in English, addressing the U.S. “The Shia are prepared to be martyrs in the cause of their faith. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran that they are defending—not just their land, not just their culture, not just their history, but their faith.”

As the Trump Administration prepares for a possible ground invasion of Iran, the Iranian regime and its loyalists are waging a propaganda war, using motifs of religion, self-sacrifice, and glory, through dozens of videos like this one that are circulating on social media. Many troll Trump and are designed to motivate Shiite Muslims in Iran and around the world. Others are in English and attempt to influence global public opinion, including in the United States, where the war is increasingly unpopular among most Americans. While these A.I. memes are built for dissemination on the modern internet, the reliance on religious iconography and references to martyrdom originate from a different era: the last time Iran was invaded by a foreign power. In the nineteen-eighties, the country fought a brutal eight-year war against Iraq, whose government was backed by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and much of the Arab world. The lessons learned from that conflict still guide the regime and its powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more than four decades later. The Iran-Iraq War “is a vast reservoir of resilience memory from which to draw on,” Hussein Banai, an Iran expert and professor of international studies at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Iran saw “that it could stand up to the United States, but also to other countries that are backed by American power. The narrative of that war is really what’s driven a sense of purpose, especially for the Revolutionary Guard.”

On Sunday, Trump vowed to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if by Tuesday night the regime doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. A defiant Iran replied that it would not open the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas flows, unless the U.S. pays for war damages. And it warned that it would retaliate “much more crushingly and extensively.” The morning before the deadline, Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” adding that “we will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. ground forces, including U.S. Special Operations Forces, seaborne marines and élite Army paratroopers, with experience in seizing strategic terrain during rapid-response combat missions, have arrived in the Middle East. Over the weekend, the risks of operating on the ground were laid bare when Iran shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet, and the two airmen in the plane ejected over the southwestern part of Iran. Later, a second, low-flying U.S. warplane, an A-10 Warthog that was part of a mission to rescue the F-15E pilot, was hit multiple times, but its pilot managed to fly out of Iran and eject safely over Kuwaiti airspace before it crashed. A U.S. HH-60W Jolly Green II combat helicopter also came under heavy fire; its crew sustained minor injuries but were able to leave Iranian airspace without mishap. While the pilot of the F-15E was rescued shortly after ejecting, the second airman, an Air Force weapons officer, fled into a mountainous region, where he climbed mountain ridges several thousand feet high, despite being injured, and successfully evaded Iranian forces for more than a day. He hid in a rock crevice and activated an emergency beacon to signal his location, setting off a sprawling mission deep inside Iran which involved commandos from SEAL Team Six, hundreds of other military personnel, and a hundred and fifty-five aircraft, including sixty-four fighters, forty-eight refuelling tankers, thirteen rescue aircraft, and four bombers. After the weapons officer was located, two U.S. transport planes that had landed at a remote forward operating base inside Iran to extract the team and the airman experienced mechanical problems, and three other planes had to be dispatched to extract them hours later. Before leaving, the team blew up the immobilized aircraft to prevent sophisticated technology from falling into Iranian hands. At a White House press conference on Monday, Trump acknowledged that the operation was “a risky decision, because we could have ended up with a hundred dead, as opposed to one or two. It’s a hard decision to make, but in the United States military we leave no American behind.”

While no U.S. service members died in the rescue, the chaos of operating inside Iran’s border is just a preview of what a full-scale ground invasion, or even limited incursions, would look like—and the Iran-Iraq War can offer a blueprint. U.S. troops could quickly find themselves fighting a guerrilla conflict against Iranian forces who deploy tactics and strategies developed during Iraq’s invasion and further honed in succeeding regional and internal conflicts. That war’s extreme death toll and the lingering memories of being occupied by a foreign force have established a mind-set that could galvanize more Iranians to support a war against an invading American force, including those who were opposed to the regime before the U.S.-Israel attack. “Those affiliated with the state know that the one thing that united everybody in post-revolutionary moments was the Iraqi invasion of Iran,” Amir Moosavi, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark who specializes in the cultural history of the Middle East, told me. The regime, Moosavi said, uses “this language of resistance to cultivate a culture of remembrance about that conflict,” which was “the first act of resistance that Iran had against the U.S. and its regional allies. It’s an evolving language that is now being used and updated for the current conflict.”

In the propaganda video, the narrator mentions the core Shiite religious figures Imam Hussein and Ali, the first Shiite Imam, as well as the Battle of Karbala, a seventh-century uprising by Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, against a tyrant named Yazid. During the confrontation, Hussein and his followers were massacred, but the imam’s quest for justice became a defining value of Shiite identity, fostering a sense of revolutionary duty to fight oppressors at any cost. Even the split-bladed sword the A.I. warrior carries outside of the White House, known as the sword of Zulfiqar, has religious connotations: it belonged to Imam Ali and symbolizes resistance and martyrdom. Trump, the narrator claims, “has no clue” about the Battle of Karbala or Shiite philosophies or their imprint on the current war. “The Islamic Republic is invincible at this moment,” he declares as the video ends with an apocalyptic scene of missiles raining chaos down on central Tel Aviv.

On September 23, 1980, one day after launching strikes on Iraqi ground forces crossed into Khuzestan, a strategic western province that contained Iran’s largest oil field and a considerable number of Iranian Arabs, a minority in the country. The previous year, the Islamic Revolution had deposed Iran’s Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and installed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an ultraconservative Shiite theocracy. From the very start of the attack by the U.S. and Israel in February, there were striking parallels to Iraq’s invasion. Before Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator, declared war on Iran, he feared that the fledgling theocracy next door would export its hard-line ideology and marshal Iraq’s Shiite majority to topple his Sunni-dominated Baathist regime. Like Trump, he viewed crushing Iran as a great service to the region—in his case, by shielding the Sunni Arab world from Shiite expansionism. Iraq took advantage of the Iranian military’s disarray in the aftermath of the revolution. It launched air strikes on Iranian airbases, fired hundreds of Scud missiles at Iranian cities, including Tehran, and targeted Iran’s oil-and-energy infrastructure, in moves reminiscent of today’s extensive U.S.-Israeli campaign to degrade the regime’s military capabilities and resilience. The U.S., the Soviet Union, and France would eventually provide intelligence and advanced weaponry to Iraq. Iran’s Air Force and military fought back, but isolated by the world and under U.S. and international sanctions, they had to scramble for spare parts for its warplanes and military equipment. Like Trump, Saddam Hussein expected a quick, decisive victory. He believed that by imposing large numbers of casualties on Iran, including chemical attacks on civilians, he could break the regime’s morale and force it to agree to his demands. He urged Iranians to rise against the government. Instead, they remained loyal to the Ayatollah. Saddam, like Trump, underestimated Iran’s fierce response and its determination to survive at any cost.

Lacking conventional military resources to fight Saddam’s army, Iran turned to asymmetric warfare, fighting back through low-cost methods. Its strategy was clear: to endure and survive, it needed to prolong the war and gradually wear down Iraq and its allies. This meant conducting guerrilla attacks and cobbling together missiles and warplanes to shell Iraqi cities. And when Iraq bombed Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, the regime retaliated, bombing Iraqi oil facilities and later using improvised mines and missiles to target ships carrying Iraqi crude in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran also spied on Iraqi positions with rudimentary precursors to drones, an early use of one of the regime’s most effective weapons in its attempt to blockade the strait. The rhetoric used by the regime was telling: Fighting the invaders was not just a matter of national defense, but a pre-ordained religious mandate." Iranians called the war the “sacred defense,” or the “imposed war,” and the conflict was framed as a modern-day Battle of Karbala. The religious branding of the war motivated hundreds of thousands of Iranians to join the Basij, or “mobilization” in Farsi, a volunteer militia that is now one of the most powerful paramilitary forces in the country, and made martyrdom an honor.

By December, 1980, these tactics had stalled Iraq’s advance. And by June, 1982, Iran had pushed Iraqi forces back across the border. But the war lasted six more years, much of it in a military stalemate. In 1988, with Iran facing battlefield setbacks, a lack of military resources, and economic ruin, Khomeini was forced to sign a U.N.-brokered ceasefire. As many as six hundred thousand Iranians had died in the conflict. He famously described the decision as “more deadly than drinking from a poisoned chalice.” But the regime survived, and Iran avoided losing any of its territory. It declared a moral and religious victory. This past Sunday, Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based in Washington, D.C., wrote in a post on X that, at that time, “Iran faced existential economic pressure and was offered a concrete diplomatic exit that did not require it to abandon its revolutionary identity. Trump has offered the pressure without a clear exit.”

The relative success of the war elevated the Revolutionary Guard from a small, street-level militia, initially created to protect Khomeini and the other clerics at the forefront of the Islamic Revolution, into the symbolic defenders of the theocracy. “The Iran-Iraq War was what the Great Patriotic War was for the Soviet Union and for Russia,” Michael Connell, an analyst who specializes in the Iranian military at C.N.A., a D.C.-based nonprofit research organization, told me, referring to the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany. “It was a coming of age, really, for the I.R.G.C., and for the regular military in Iran, because so many of the leaders that have shaped those organizations for the past few decades got their start during the war.”

These leaders spent the next four decades preparing for another major invasion, specifically one by the United States. The regime had never portrayed the war with Iraq as a bilateral fight but, rather, as a proxy war led by the U.S. and its Arab allies. I.R.G.C. commanders became Iran’s most powerful generals—many are still leading the war today—and the Iranian military focussed on improving its asymmetric war capabilities and building its own defense industry. That included ballistic missiles, in addition to low-cost mines and drones. To project power and deterrence, the regime also launched a nuclear program and influenced regional wars with a network of proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza. As Iransaw it, “The only existential threat to the Iranians was the U.S., and secondarily Israel,” Connell said. They spent decades studying “how the U.S. operates, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for ways that they could invest resources into things that would deliver more bang for the buck.”

Today, the soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq War are still memorialized in town and city squares across the country. Every September, the regime celebrates “Sacred Defense Week” to commemorate the start of the war and honor the dead with military parades. In schools, the war is taught in such a way as to instill the values of resistance and martyrdom in children, as well as a distrust of America and the West.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has said that the U.S. can achieve its objectives in Iran without using ground troops But Trump has sent mixed signals and has publicly said he likes to keep opponents guessing about his intentions. In either case, the Iranian regime seems to be prepared, militarily and in its messaging. In a social-media post in late March, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote, “How can the US, which can’t even protect its own soldiers at its bases in the region and instead leaves them stashed away in hotels and parks, protect them on our soil?” For decades, the I.R.G.C. and other forces have regularly conducted military exercises and drills to prepare for a ground invasion. Today, Iran has roughly six hundred and ten thousand active-duty soldiers, including a hundred and ninety thousand I.R.G.C. members, and it can draw upon approximately another million Basij fighters. There are reports that the I.R.G.C. is sending reinforcements to Kharg Island, through which ninety per cent of Iran’s oil exports flow, and bolstering its defenses, including planting sea mines to slow down an amphibious landing. Other U.S. targets could potentially include territory in or near the Strait of Hormuz, with the aim of ending Iran’s closure of economically vital shipping lanes, and also sites where Iran has stockpiled its enriched uranium.

In 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, American combat troops slipped over remote borders without stiff resistance and struck the military’s nerve center in Baghdad, debilitating Saddam’s command-and-control systems. In Iran, a similar scenario is unlikely. The regime has set up a decentralized “mosaic” defense system with I.R.G.C. and regular Army command posts spread out across the country, replete with their own intelligence capabilities and supplies of missiles, drones, and other advanced weaponry. Lower-level commanders have the authority to conduct certain types of operations without approval from central command, if contact with Tehran is disrupted or lost–an operational guideline stemming from Iran's observations of how the US attacked Iraq. Multiple Iranian units, including the Basij, could be used to swarm U.S. troops. “Let’s say you were invading the South, it’s not kids from Tehran or some other place that are manning bases,” Afshon Ostovar, the author of “Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East” told me. “It’s all kids from the local neighborhoods. They know the terrain, they know the valleys, they know the caves, they know the roads. That gives them a certain advantage. And Iran has also learned, not just from the Iran-Iraq War, but from the Iraq War during the U.S. occupation, some of the vulnerabilities of U.S. ground forces.”

American ground units could face battlefield scenarios similar to those they faced in Iraq. Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the Quds Force, a wing of the I.R.G.C., who was assassinated by the U.S. in 2020, was the primary architect of the offensives used by Iran-backed Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops during the Iraq War. This included planting powerful bombs known as Explosively Formed Penetrators that can rip through U.S. armored vehicles on roads. “Iran has these in abundance. Iran knows how to place them on roadsides. Iran knows how to activate them remotely,” Ostovar told me. The Iranians can also deploy small kamikaze drones called F.P.V.s on surveillance missions or to crash into U.S. troops. The F.P.V.s are controlled by incredibly long fibre-optic cables, preventing attempts to jam their frequencies with radio signals. “Those aren’t super helpful when attacking things very far away, but within a twenty-mile, or fifteen-mile, kind of zone, they could be used pretty effectively,” Ostovar said. “We haven’t seen Iran use them, to my knowledge, at least in this conflict, but they could be saving for a later fight.” The I.R.G.C. also has fleets of fast-attack boats, some of them armed with mines and missiles, and others that can be laden with explosives and used to stage suicide attacks against naval vessels. The regime knows that it doesn’t need to outgun U.S. ground forces to achieve its strategic objectives. It only needs to be successful in occasionally killing American troops to make the war even more unpopular back home, a vulnerability for Trump ahead of the midterm elections. Referring back to the Iran-Iraq War, Connell, the Iranian military expert, said, “If you’re looking at Iranian military writings in the subsequent decades, there’s always that emphasis on, we can take hits.” He explained the Iranian perspective: “We’re willing to die. You are not. You’re going to take a few hits, and then you’re going to say it’s too risky.’” Last week, Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, warned that “the soldiers of Iran have long been waiting for this historic confrontation with the U.S. military forces,” adding that “the battle on the ground will be more terrifying for you than anywhere else.”

Taking extreme risks, though, could prove disastrous for the regime and its forces, especially the I.R.G.C. During the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini and the I.R.G.C. overplayed their hand and rejected all attempts to end the conflict, even after pushing Iraqi forces from Iranian soil in 1982. Driven by revolutionary zeal, they vowed to keep fighting until Saddam was ousted from power. As the war dragged on, Iran’s military and economy were decimated. To preserve its power and ideology, the I.R.G.C. sent tens of thousands of Iranians to their death in so-called human-wave operations to overwhelm Iraq’s front lines. Last week, the regime launched a similar nationwide recruiting drive called “Janfada,” or “sacrificing life,” seeking volunteers to defend the country against American ground forces, including children as young as twelve, who will operate checkpoints and serve as spies. This time around, though, heavy casualties risk triggering internal mass unrest in a nation where a sizable portion of the population is anti-regime, regardless of their religious embrace of martyrdom. And after the Iran-Iraq War, the I.R.G.C. prioritized the buildup of its asymmetric war capabilities so much that Iran’s conventional army, known as the Artesh, was neglected ; its infrastructure has atrophied. Iran’s air-defense systems remain weak, allowing U.S. and Israeli warplanes to dominate Iran’s skies in the current conflict. (Of course, the regime still poses a threat to U.S. and Israel aircraft, as last weekend’s incident reveals.) “At least rhetorically, in terms of propaganda, they’ve been preparing for this for decades,” Ostovar told me, referring to a U.S. invasion. “But there’s also an element of hubris that drives the I.R.G.C., and it’s unclear to me how much that hubris may have undermined their military planning.”

To mobilize Iranians in support of an extended war against the U.S. and Israel, the regime has triggered the memories of Iraq’s invasion that it has nurtured for the past four decades. Over the past month, officials have referred to this war by again using the terms “sacred defense” or as the “imposed war.” Pro-regime Shiites inside and outside Iran have branded Trump as a modern-day “Yazid,” and references to the Battle of Karbala have flooded social media in Iran. Moosavi, the professor of Iranian cultural history, pointed me to an A.I.-generated animation made by an Iranian rapper which has gone viral in the country. It starts with Trump tossing dice at a roulette table, and ends with him crying over American-flag-draped coffins. The lyrics go:

Sacred Defense, we protecting the soil
While you sacrifice soldiers to pay for your spoil
You thought you ran the globe sitting on your throne
Now we turning every base into a bed of stone. ♦

It’s weird out there—you’re aging, the world is changing, and the economic landscape is shifting beneath your feet. The things you once cared about suddenly seem so stupid. The things you now care about objectively are. People are dying. Babies are crying. Everyone around you has a crazed look in their eyes. And, each time you meet up with an old friend, or a new acquaintance, or a person you’ve known sort of well for some amount of time, one thing is abundantly clear: they’re going back to school to become a therapist.

When the first friend mentions this, it comes as a delightful surprise. She’s been working at a fancy shoe store that’s really a fancy drug front for far too long. But, when the second, third, and fourth competent buddy with a bachelor’s degree divulges the same update, you may start to wonder—how does this make me feel?

It’s important to note that this phenomenon is beyond your control. We were all fed false promises in our youth about what we could achieve if we set our minds to it, or what we could be if we wanted it enough. Surely, every generation faces this devastating crossroads of actual adulthood. We can’t all be experimental d.j.s forever. Your own therapist had to have decided to become a therapist at some point, right?

But, does having a lot of about-to-be therapists in your life mean that you should become a therapist, too? Does having zero therapists-to-be around you mean that you’re an unexamined brute with no hope for self-actualization? Let’s find out.

• If eight of your friends are slated to become therapists this year, I’m suspicious of your definition of “friend.” I wonder if those same “friends” consider you their “friend.” You may want to discuss the concept of friendship with your very own therapist (who, may I remind you, is also not your friend).
• If seven of your friends are about to become therapists, you have an M.F.A. in acting from a prestigious institution and a handful of legitimate IMDb credits. All seven of these friends are other actors you’ve worked with over the years, or, more likely, participated in an unpaid staged reading alongside.
• If six of your friends are becoming therapists, you’ve thought about becoming a therapist yourself. Many people have told you what a good listener you are. Little do they know, you’re just a freak for gossip.
• If five of your friends are currently completing their M.S.W., you identify as someone who is very good at therapy. You love therapy! You roll your eyes at people you know who are not in therapy when talking about them behind their backs. Your primary goal in your own sessions is to be the best at therapy ever. All you want is to be your therapist’s favorite. Which you are. You know you are.
• If four of your friends are in therapy school, you’re a big feelings baddie. You likely feel an immense amount of nostalgia for nearly everything from your past. You live for reunions, just so you can resuscitate shallowly buried negative emotions. You’re a glutton for punishment, because that punishment leads to more feelings.
• If three of your friends are about to be therapists, that seems kind of unremarkable.
• If two of your friends are getting into that therapy life, you are the child of therapists and have done everything in your power to avoid people who might become therapists. You have almost succeeded, but not quite. Do you want to talk about what might be triggering your sense of failure?
• If one of your friends is studying to be a therapist, it’s your wife and she’s thinking of leaving you.
• If none of your friends are becoming therapists, it’s time to look inward. Perhaps consider . . . therapy? ♦

Family-centered content creation is an overstuffed toy chest of contradictions. Its meticulous mise en scène is that of candid, improvisational home life. Its ostensibly D.I.Y. output is financed by brand partnerships and affiliate marketing. It takes private and noninstrumental moments of childhood—potty-training mishaps, menarche, barfing—and makes them public and transactional; see, for example, the prominent mommy vlogger Aubree Jones, whose tween daughter’s first period was effectively sponsored by a feminine-hygiene brand. Jones’s seventh child, born last year, is named Disney. If “Infinite Jest” were a conjuration spell, it would manifest a momfluencer.

The most successful and lucrative family vlogs are indiscreet almost by definition—and yet the wrong kind of indiscretion can derail the whole gravy train. The vlogger Jordan Cheyenne, for one, wrecked her sharenting career by accidentally posting footage of herself coaching her son, who was distraught over the family’s sick puppy, to make a specific kind of sad face for YouTube. (“Act like you’re crying, really quick,” she prompted him. “I am crying,” he wailed in reply.)

Perhaps the strangest paradox of the sharenting economy, however, can be found simply in the staggering number of views, subscribers, and advertising dollars flowing toward content that is excruciatingly boring when it is not excruciatingly uncomfortable. In her new book, “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online,” the journalist Fortesa Latifi acknowledges that even some of the most popular sharenting content, which can net its creators millions of dollars a year, is “objectively not that interesting” and “almost wildly mundane.” The young stars of these videos might be opening Amazon packages, sitting in a dentist’s chair, lip-synching to Morgan Wallen in an all-white kitchen beneath a giant box-pendant light fixture, or barfing. The mystery of why anyone would watch these displays is compounded by how little we know of the watchers themselves or of how their views are monetized, because social-media platforms are generally reticent to share demographic breakdowns of user data and ad revenues. Or, as America’s greatest advertising mind, Don Draper, once said, “Who knows why people do what they do?”

We know a little, though. We know that pedophiles make up a disturbing proportion of the audience for family- and child-centered social-media content, and that the advent of generative A.I. has turned these images and videos into potential fodder for child sexual-abuse material. (Last month, a jury in New Mexico found that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation and ordered the company to pay three hundred and seventy-five million dollars in damages; Meta plans to appeal.) Bots are often in the mix, too, along with the hate-watchers who populate the “snark communities” devoted to family vloggers on Reddit. But, when Latifi conducted her own survey of hundreds of fans of sharenting content, she identified another, perhaps overlooked category of viewer: a child, teen, or young adult searching for an outlet from a lonely or volatile situation in their own home. The “presentation of perfect family life from vloggers,” Latifi explains, “was how they achieved that escape.”

“Like, Follow, Subscribe” is decently reported, if clunkily written; it lacks the legal and philosophical acumen of Leah A. Plunkett’s “Sharenthood” or the sociological insights that Kathryn Jezer-Morton brings to her studies of momfluencers. The strongest and most original passages of Latifi’s book, however brief, are devoted to her survey participants, who say that clicking on kidfluencer content helped them feel like “part of a community,” even like “part of their family.” One of these fans, who described herself as a onetime “isolated homeschooler,” told Latifi, “It was my way of experiencing the world when I was stuck at home all day.”

Ironically, this isolated homeschooler was likely watching other homeschoolers. Traditional school systems are not a draw for mega-momfluencers such as Hannah Neeleman, of @BallerinaFarm (nine children, more than ten million Instagram followers); Jessica Ballinger, of @BallingerFamily (six children, more than three million YouTube subscribers); or Kristine Pack, of @FamilyFunPack (eight children, more than ten million YouTube subscribers), all of whom have homeschooled. Aubree Jones, in a 2023 post on her TikTok account (more than two million followers), offered three reasons that she homeschools, starting with “efficiency”—she boasted that her kids could complete their daily schoolwork in two hours or less, and suggested that an average day at a traditional school stretches to six or more hours to provide “day care” to working parents. Two was “flexibility”: Jones can choose what her children learn and, just as important, when they take vacations (which generate great content!). Third and last was “mass shootings.”

A fourth reason, obvious but unspoken, is that homeschooled kids have more time and availability to make stuff for the family vlog. In this respect, power sharenters may homeschool for the same reason that schools in farming communities used to close down during spring planting and fall harvests: so that the kids could stay home and work.

The social-media ascent of the religious-conservative “trad wife,” and of the von Trapp-size brood skipping blondly behind her, is inextricable from the material conditions necessary for a typical family-vlogging operation, in which a stay-at-home mother is the main producer-director and, ideally, adds fresh infants to her cast of characters on a roughly biennial schedule. (Several of Latifi’s sources in the family-vlogging industry believe, incredibly or not, that some sharenters “are explicitly choosing to have more children for brand deals.”) In its specific appeal to evangelical Christian and Mormon communities, including the semi-apostates of what’s often referred to as MomTok, mommy vlogging has striking parallels with multilevel marketing: both industries offer money-making opportunities that are supposedly compatible with traditional homemaking, and both demand constant leveraging of personal relationships in order to achieve and sustain success.

What makes sharenting far more ominous, of course, is that its practitioners must chase the mood swings of the social-media algorithm if they want to extract maximum value from family life. Positive pregnancy tests and squishy newborns usually deliver strong returns. So does footage of a child in physical or emotional pain. As a lower-tier mommy vlogger tells Latifi, “The videos that got the most eyes on them are the ones that had the bloody noses, or the broken arms, or the emergency room visit, or whatever.” One of the pinned posts on the Instagram page of Jamie Otis Hehner (a million followers) is a video of her toddler son suffering a febrile seizure as one of his siblings sobs in the background.

The abundant risks and perverse incentives of the sharenting industry have, in recent years, inspired some well-meaning legislation. In 2023, Illinois became the first state to pass a law explicitly intended to safeguard the earnings of kidfluencers, requiring that a percentage of profits from monetized content be placed in a trust until the child reaches the age of eighteen. Since then, several more states—including the nation’s two busiest sharenting hubs, Utah and California—have either passed new laws or amended existing ones to similar ends, extending the same protections to the child stars of social media that have long been in place for their counterparts in film and television.

But the texts of these new laws—which are heavily predicated on a kidfluencer’s willingness to sue his or her own parents—are at turns vague, confounding, and possibly toothless. Utah’s law, which came into effect last year, specifies that family vloggers “shall use the formula E = (A/T) * (Q/S) * (M/2) or the formula E = 245 (A/T) * (1/X) * (M/2) to determine the qualifying minor’s earnings”; this alphabet soup of variables requires tallying “all paid minutes featuring any qualifying minor.” As is the case in other states, Utah not only puts parents in charge of this complex bookkeeping but also appoints them as their children’s trustees—and all in the name of protecting children’s earnings from greedy parents. The fox is still guarding the henhouse, but at least now the hens can sue.

Some legislatures are attempting to find additional legal remedies for former kidfluencers who believe that they were harmed by oversharing parents. Utah and Minnesota have recently codified formal processes that allow minors to request the deletion of content in which they appear, but these seem open to any number of challenges on First Amendment grounds. Arkansas’s Child Content Creation Protection Act, which will take effect in July, makes it “unlawful to financially benefit” from airing “any visual depiction of a minor with the intent to sexually gratify or elicit a sexual response in the viewer or any other person.” This provision, which is aimed at parents who share images of their underage daughters in bikinis and leotards for a monetized audience of perverts, describes an objectively abhorrent phenomenon, but in inevitably subjective terms.

As more and more kidfluencers come of age, and as they confront all that may have been lost or broken in their childhoods, they are likely to find that the law is an imperfect instrument for restitution. Multiple U.S. Supreme Court decisions, dating to the nineteen-twenties, have strongly favored parents’ rights to determine the best interests of their children, as the attorney Shreya Agarwala explained in a superb 2025 article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Privacy law may apply to, say, a stranger who broadcasts a toddler’s febrile seizure to a potential audience of millions, but the same child generally cannot claim a legal right to privacy from his mother or father. Similarly, a minor may feel that her reputation has been permanently warped by embarrassing childhood footage of her tantrums or bathroom accidents, but, Agarwala writes, defamation law is a bulwark against falsehoods, not against the disclosure of true events that your parents immortalized for clicks. Agarwala briefly mulls whether public-health campaigns on the dangers of sharenting might be more effective than legal action—and the answer may well have been yes in a pre-COVID, pre-R.F.K., Jr., era of institutional trust.

Maybe it’s not too fantastical to hope for a surprise shift in the Zeitgeist, one that compels members of the family-vlogging élite to start withdrawing their kids from view. Maybe quiet parenting, like quiet quitting and quiet luxury before it, could catch on as a meme among key influencers. Maybe concealing one’s children from social media could become a status symbol, and putting them on public display could acquire a useful stigma—not that I’d want to wish disgrace on mommy vloggers. I’d rather not know anything about them at all. “It’s a dark place to be,” a former sharenter tells Latifi, “watching other women do things.” ♦

On a recent morning in central Vermont, where I live, it was raining, and the wood frogs had just begun to chorus. The sap run from the maple trees has started to dwindle as the branches begin to bud out. There is a timeless quality to a New England spring (or as timeless as anything can be in an age of rapid climate change), and part of that timelessness is the United States Forest Service, whose land boundaries I wander across most days on rambles through the woods. For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century.

The Forest Service controls a hundred and fifty-four national forests and twenty national grasslands—at a hundred and ninety-three million acres, that’s the second-largest land base, public or private, in the country, trailing only the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the nation’s federal rangelands. Sometimes the national forests are confused with the (much smaller) national-park system, which is understandable—often those parks butt up against the forests, and the uniforms of the two services look a little alike, and that’s before we’ve even considered the Fish and Wildlife Service. But, if you see people driving a minty-green pickup, they’re from the Forest Service, a job that implies a very particular history.

The agency’s antecedents date to the nineteenth century, but it was at the beginning of the twentieth, under President Theodore Roosevelt, that it came into its own. Its first chief was Gifford Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who believed in protecting the country’s natural resources to help power its growth—he wanted there to be plenty of trees for the industrial needs of the country. “Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day,” he said. In his time, however, Pinchot’s biggest confrontation was with the forces of what might be called “preservation,” saving forests not for their industrial potential but for their intrinsic meaning and beauty. The towering figure here was John Muir, and, while it’s easy to overstate the differences between the two men (they were, at worst, frenemies) and their visions, the differences were nonetheless very real. Muir and Pinchot clashed, for instance, over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite, with Pinchot’s take—that it was “the best, and, within reasonable limits of cost, the only means of supplying San Francisco with water”—prevailing, in 1913.

But, if providing resources for economic growth was the Forest Service’s founding ethos, over time it has, in patches, reflected a more Muirish view: the national-forest system now includes about half of all the designated “wilderness” in the lower forty-eight states. When you drive into a national forest (and you likely have, since the Service retains the largest road network in the world, eight times the length of the interstate-highway system), you pass a sign that proclaims it a “Land of Many Uses.” In the Green Mountain National Forest, near where I live, there’s not just timber production but, also, the Breadloaf Wilderness, big stretches of the Long Trail (America’s first long-distance hiking trail), snowmobile corridors, ski areas, and a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail with signs every few hundred yards quoting his poems. Although there’s always been pressure on the Service to “increase the cut” and harvest more timber for local mills and builders, and although this has often led to egregious clear-cutting (the Service was once reputed to employ more landscape architects than any other organization in the world, largely to make those clear-cuts less visible from the roads), there’s also been a measurable move toward sounder science.

Aldo Leopold, for instance, essentially invented the field of conservation biology while working on game management in the national forests of the Southwest; the U.S.D.A. website, as of this writing, still pays tribute to his un-Trumpian ideas about “the benefit that comes from slowing down and taking the time to listen to nature. In today’s world, being quiet is a valuable commodity; taking time to stop and listen for those minute details outdoors that weave a tapestry of stories all around us is a rewarding experience if we but stop and pay attention.”

The Service maintains many experimental forests, which have produced new understandings of woodland ecology, making it clear that the trees that cover about a third of the country are far more than machines for producing lumber or fibre. I was once told, over a beer with one of the heads of the Clinton-era Forest Service, that its research showed unequivocally that the greatest value of those millions of acres was not timber or even recreation but the way that intact forests absorb and filter water, which reduces both flooding and the need for expensive artificial filtration.

Sound science, we have learned, is anathema to the Trump Administration, which moved within weeks of taking office this term to demand more timber production from America’s forests. So it was no surprise that part of the “reorganization” announced last week involved the ceasing of most of the experimental-forest research and closure of the research stations in the U.S.F.S. network. These are the sites of experiments that can reach back for decades; since trees, by definition, take a fairly long time to grow, that span allows scientists to understand how forests develop and to look for the changes that a warming climate is producing.

But there’s a deeper message in the reorganization, too, which shuts down the Service’s nine regional offices and relocates its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. Utah is at the heart of what’s been called the Sagebrush Rebellion, which rose during the Reagan era to challenge the prevailing management of federal lands, and, indeed, the entire idea of federal lands. In recent years, Utah’s senator Mike Lee has led efforts to sell off huge tracts of those lands across the West to developers. The Senate refused to act on those plans last year, one of the few defeats suffered by the MAGA right. That was largely because of a huge swell of protests from hunters, fishermen, hikers, mountain bikers, and other recreational users of these lands—and from the businesses that cater to them. The Forest Service reorganization is a backdoor way to achieve some of the same goals: during Trump’s first term, his Administration moved the B.L.M. headquarters from Washington to Colorado, which led many of its key employees to quit. (The Biden Administration moved it back.) It is likely that the same will happen with Forest Service workers (thousands of them have already been DOGE-d). The Service will now have, instead of a regional headquarters, a “state coördinator” in the capitals of states where it has large holdings, and I think it’s safe to predict that these people will service connections to the interests that value timber more highly than those that value, say, water filtration, much less backpacking.

The U.S.D.A. last month announced big loans and grants to companies revitalizing sawmills and wood-processing infrastructure. The current chief of the Forest Service, Tom Schultz, as the Sierra Club explained, served as the vice-president of resources and government affairs with a company called Idaho Forest Group, one of America’s largest lumber producers, “where he led timber procurement operations and managed relationships with government officials.” As Schultz put it recently, “The value of National Forest Systems lands is demonstrated by providing various forest products, such as timber, lumber, paper, bioenergy, and other wood products.”

It is perhaps beyond obvious that the Trump Administration would look at a forest and see board feet of timber. But the gutting of the Forest Service couldn’t come at a more inopportune moment. This winter was by far the hottest ever recorded across the Western U.S., and that has left the mountains of the West, where Forest Service lands are primarily concentrated, with the smallest snowpacks in recorded history, which, a new study from Western Colorado University found last month, is intimately linked to wildfire danger. The possibility—the probability—of conflagration is on every Western mind. It turns out that conservation really does matter: when you burn too much oil, draw too much water, cut too many trees, you eventually end up in enormous trouble. The Trump Administration seems to have decided that, if we’re in this bad a fix, we might as well make the last few dollars out of it, on every possible front. To borrow, out of context, a Trump quote from last weekend, “All Hell will reign down.” ♦